Read the passage and answer the questions given below it.
Every year, around the third week of July, a photograph arrives on our family WhatsApp group from my aunt in Hyderabad. It shows the lane outside her flat with water up to the door handles of the parked cars. The caption changes. The water does not.
The usual explanation is the rain, and the rain is easy to blame. It does fall in fewer and fiercer bursts now, and no drain built for an older climate can carry a month’s share in one afternoon. But this account leaves something out. The Deccan never had water to spare, and the kings and village councils who settled it learnt to hold on to what fell. They dug chains of tanks, each one spilling into the next one downhill, so that a heavy storm was handed on from tank to tank instead of being poured into a street. Hyderabad once had hundreds of them. Bengaluru’s old lakes worked the same way.
Many of those tanks, in both cities, now lie under bus stands, housing colonies and, in one case I know of, a stadium. Nobody plotted this. A dry lakebed in May looks like empty land, and a myopic kind of planning, the kind that reads a map only for the next five years, saw no reason to leave it empty. The tanks were not destroyed so much as forgotten, one plot at a time.
I do not think the answer is to dig them all out again; too many families live where the water used to sit. But I have noticed that the lanes which flood first often have names ending in ‘kunta’ or ‘cheruvu’, the Telugu words for a pond and a lake. The city has kept the names. It has only lost the reason for them.
The writer’s attitude towards the loss of the old tanks can best be described as:
Answer & explanation
Correct answer: option 3
The correct answer is Option (3) → Rueful but realistic: sorry about a slow loss that cannot simply be undone
The writer is sad about the lost tanks but does not ask for the impossible.
- Rueful means feeling sorry about something, in a quiet way. The writer quietly regrets that the tanks were “forgotten, one plot at a time”. The last line, “It has only lost the reason for them”, has the same sad note.
- Realistic means seeing things as they really are. The writer does not want the tanks dug out again. Too many families now live on that land.
Why the Other Options are Incorrect?
Option 1: Nostalgic: longing for the age when kings ruled over the Deccan — Incorrect. Wrong focus: nostalgic means missing a happy time in the past. The kings come up only because they built the tanks. The writer does not miss their rule.
Option 2: Indignant: angry with the planners who knowingly destroyed the lakes — Incorrect. Contradicted: indignant means angry at something unfair. But the writer blames no one and says, “Nobody plotted this.”
Option 4: Indifferent: unconcerned, since the rain and not the tanks causes the floods — Incorrect. Contradicted: indifferent means not caring. The writer cares enough to notice which lanes flood first.